This was less a ghost story and more a story about a dysfunctional family on the verge of implosion. Ariel is adopted and even before Roberta has her one and only natural child, she has begun to hate her daughter. Ariel is not like “normal” children and so Roberta thinks she’s defective and wishes there was a way to return her like a pair of shoes that pinches. Then when the baby dies of crib death, she snaps and actually blames Ariel for it.

The father and husband is a borderline alcoholic who is completely uninvolved in the lives of his wife and daughter. He routinely shuts himself up in his manly study for an evening of brandy, books and pipe smoking. How cliché. But he does love Ariel in his very distant way. Roberta on the other hand I don’t think he likes much. Distance doesn’t exactly foster intimacy or love. They sleep in separate beds.

Which brings us to Roberta and her newly dead child. It is not David’s and they both know it, but do not speak of it. The true father doesn’t acknowledge it either, but he does show up for the funeral. After that, he and Bobby start their affair again. This time however, it is a hollow reward. Neither are satisfied by it knowing it’s a hopeless exercise – neither will leave their spouses -, but they are compelled to sneak off to various anonymous hotel rooms.

So Roberta thinks the house is haunted because she keeps seeing this ghostly woman and because the pilot lights on the stove go out (Ariel blows them out to torment Roberta) and because Ariel’s steps don’t make the stairs creak, but hers and David’s do. What an idiot. Then Ariel finds an old portrait of a woman in the attic and feels that it is a picture of the ghost. She hangs the painting in her room and sometimes lights a candle and sort of falls into a trance before it. This behavior and a few coincidences with some injured classmates makes her think she may have unconsciously been responsible for her brother’s death. Equal idiocy, but if people behaved rationally in stories they would be very boring.

Roberta has been telling these tales to Jeff, her lover and he does a little investigating. His guess is that the portrait is of a woman who used to live in Roberta’s house in the mid 1800s. All of her children die mysteriously within a 3-week period. She was ostensibly blamed, but never charged with any crime since it was obviously due to the fact that she was overwhelmed with grief because her sailor husband was lost at sea. Eventually she commits suicide by sticking her head in the very oven Roberta so despises. For some reason, this knowledge makes Jeff go crazy because Ariel resembles this woman closely.

He starts stalking her, following her from home to school and to her friend’s house. Eventually he coaxes her into the car and pulls a gun on her. Instead of panicking she comes on to him in a completely uncharacteristic way – she gropes his crotch and kisses him and has sex with him. She’s 12 and a young 12 at that. Give me a break. I was 12 in 1980 and there is NO WAY I would have an idea to do this, much less how to do it if the idea did occur to me. Up until that point it was a very believable novel. Bah.

But, Jeff lets her go and she heads to her friend’s house who sees a change in her – she seems older. After that she heads home and Roberta is popping valium, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Pretty soon the news comes on to reveal that Jeff went off the deep end, shot his whole family to death and then himself. This puts Roberta over the edge, too and she kills herself with valium and the gas stove she loves so much. ( )

This book is unreadable and I put it down after a short time. Shame, because I'm a big fan of Block and was trying to read everything I could find by him. ( )

As a Lawrence Block fan, I find this book odd -- oddly unreadable, that is. ( )